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3 months ago
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A repulsed triathlete has revealed how disgusting it is to swim in the River Seine - and slammed 'bull****' around organisers keeping Olympians safe.
Belgian star Jolien Vermeylen was part of the contingent wthat swam 1.5 kilometres in the Seine on Wednesday as Brit Beth Potter brought home a bronze medal.
The women's triathlon had been postponed on Tuesday after tests revealed the Seine was not clean enough to swim in.
Around £1.2billion was spent clearing up a river that had seen a 100-year swimming ban - but as recently as June it had 10 times the permitted E.coli bacteria levels.
'While under the bridge, I felt and saw things that we shouldn’t think about too much,' Vermeylen told VTM.
Jolien Vermeylen claimed she 'felt and saw things' she didn't want to think about in the Seine
The triathlete claimed it was 'bull**** that athlete safety was a priority as athletes were made to swim in the river despite it previously being banned for 100 years
'The Seine has been dirty for a hundred years, so they can’t say that the safety of the athletes is a priority. That’s bulls***!'
A statement from Paris 2024 and World Triathlon had read: 'Paris 2024 and World Triathlon reiterate that their priority is the health of the athletes.'
Vermeylen, who finished 24th, added: 'I drank a lot of water, so we’ll know tomorrow if I’m sick or not. It doesn’t taste like Coca-Cola or Sprite, of course.
'If the race hadn’t taken place, it would have been a disgrace for the organisation, for Paris, for France. It was now or never, and they couldn’t cancel the race completely either.
'Now they just have to hope that there won’t be too many sick athletes. I took pro-biotics, I drank my Yakult, I couldn’t do more.
'I had the idea of not drinking water, but yes, it failed. Just like I had the idea of not falling but that failed too.'
There were fears that Olympic chiefs would have to cancel the swimming segment of the triathlon and convert it to a duathlon.
Triathlon training sessions in the Seine were cancelled on Sunday and Monday, leaving athletes in the dark about whether the swimming would go ahead.
Beth Potter secured bronze in the women's triathlon after training sessions were canned
Around £1.2billion was spent on regenerating the river but multiple tests deemed it unclean
Alex Yee won one of two golds for Team GB on Wednesday with a last-gasp triathlon victory
A French water charity found 'alarming' levels of bacteria in all but one of 14 samples taken from the Seine in the six months before April
Swimming in the Seine, which dissects Paris, has been banned since 1923. In 1990, Jacques Chirac, then mayor of the city, famously declared that he would make it clean enough to enter, but failed in his mission.
Parisians had threatened to defecate in the river in the build-up to the Olympics in protest against the seemingly ineffective spending to clear it up.
Meanwhile, the director general of Paris 2024 refused to apologise to competitors when asked by Mail Sport if he would do so.
‘We have to wait,’ Etienne Thobois said. ‘We don’t do fiction scenarios. We are very respectful of the athletes. They are the heart of the Games. We have done everything we could in relation with the international federations and public authorities to achieve the goal of swimming in the Seine which will be a fantastic legacy.'
While Potter brought home bronze in the women's triathlon, Alex Yee managed gold in the men's iteration.
Clawing out extra resevres of energy in the final gasps of the race, Yee overtook an exhausted Hayden Wilde in the final moments and finished six seconds ahead of the New Zealand athlete.
August 5 will see the mixed triathlon relay.
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